“Gosh! I thought I was alone!” He mumbled it like a boy who is caught day-dreaming by an elder, and with the same flushed shamedness. And then, in his more natural voice, “I say, excuse me, Joan.” The queer expression that swept Joan’s features was not intelligible to him. But instinctively he knew that he had never seen its like before in her face. It was the shadow of a strange consternation. “You forgot I was here!... Hugh!” “I was imagining things,” he tried to explain, and made it worse than it need have been. “Kid stuff.... Desert islands, adventure.... New lands, you know.... I thought—” But he saw that he was offending her, and struggled for something else to talk about. “See here,” he blurted, “does this sunlight remind you of Clare’s? It does me. And the green of that water! It’s Bermudian.” Joan’s head and shoulders were turned away. He had trouble in catching her words. She was saying, “Crowell Fuller was telling me last night at dinner that he thinks we’ve vastly over-rated the importance of Gregory Clare. He bought two of the paintings himself and grants he’s important—but not so important. It’s a pity, and Michael will be disappointed. For Fuller could hold up Michael’s hands so substantially, if he only saw eye to eye. He’s the one person—over here—in a position to. And he’s not doing it.” She was cool, impersonal. She might have been talking to some one she had just met at a tea, except for that turned-away shoulder, the averted face. “But does it really matter—now?” Hugh asked, genuinely surprised. “The Metropolitan’s bought a bunch of ’em. There were none left untaken after the third day of the exposition. Ariel has more money from them than even her father dreamed of,—enough, if it’s managed at all well, to secure her a free, even opulent life by ordinary standards. So what can Crowell Fuller or any other person do now to spoil things? You’re certainly borrowing trouble, Joan.” She swung on him angrily. At last he had given her a cause for anger which she could openly acknowledge. And Hugh, obtuse, did not dream that the fury now directed at his head was not caused by his last remarks at all, but by what had gone before. Her voice was splintered with anger, all the lovely intonations splintered and lost. “I thought Gregory Clare was your friend. After all, you were the first purchaser he ever had. And now you can so _stupidly_ say that it doesn’t matter what place he’s to hold among American painters! Nothing matters, I take it, except the money that his dear little daughter’s pulled from the sale. I tell you that Gregory Clare, dead, is worth a million of Ariel Clares living. A million—million! But now that she won’t have to drudge for a living, it’s no matter to you what becomes of Clare’s wonderful art. You are content. Complacent. Very exhilarating!” She laughed with what sounded like bitterest scorn.